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Chapter 8
SADHANA FOR A HAPPY ENDING OF LIFE: THE YOGA OF CONSTANCY
37. Living With The Awareness Of Death
10. And when death finally comes, man begins to take stock of what he has in balance at the end of his life. A dull and lazy student in the examination hall just looks here and there and whiles away his time. Dear chap, is Saraswati, the Goddess of knowledge, going to come down from heaven to write answers for you? He keeps the answer-book blank or at best scribbles a few lines and submits it when the time is up. Our condition is no different. But, keeping in mind that life ultimately ends in death, we must constantly practice throughout our life the means by which we can make the last moment pure, sacred and happy. From this very moment, we should be concerned with having the best of the samskaras. But who cares? On the contrary, we are constantly training ourselves in bad ways; we are constantly teaching our sense-organs to behave in a perverse and wayward fashion. The mind must be trained in a different way. It should be led to what is good and should be encouraged to get absorbed in it. The moment we realise that we have erred, we should start taking corrective steps. Once we realise that we have made a mistake, should we go on repeating it? The moment you come to realise your error is the moment of your rebirth. It should mark a new beginning in your life. Look at it as the dawn of your new life. You are now truly awake. Now you should critically examine your life day and night. You should become alert lest you should slip again; lest you should go back to practising bad ways. 11. A few years ago, I had gone to meet my grandmother. She had grown quite old. She would say, “Vinya, I don’t remember things these days. I go to fetch the ghee but return empty-handed.” But she could vividly describe an incident about her gold ornaments that had occurred fifty years ago. She could not remember what had happened before five minutes, but the strong samskara imprinted on the mind fifty years ago was still fresh. What could the reason be? She must have narrated the incident again and again. Hence it clung to her memory and became a part of her being. I said to myself, “O God! Let grandma not remember her ornaments at least at the time of death!” |
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